Kill Your Childhood Heroes
by britishtwat
Summary: He kind of feels like he's declined into irrelevance, until he gets a voicemail at 2:03am.


"Do you think Peter's going to be a problem?" Cora asks not even a few days after they've first left, and he thinks about it but doesn't really say anything. He wonders if they could handle Peter, probably better than he had done if he's being honest.

"He's not going to be a problem." Derek says to her, but she gives a noise that is not agreement at his assessment of the situation.

"He's not on our side." She says. "He probably never was and never will be."

But no matter what he's done, Derek thinks, he's _family_, and he can't lose anymore of that.

"He doesn't need to take a side Cora, this isn't high school anymore." He says but then remembers that technically she still is in high school and shuts up.

_Voicemail received at 2:03am on the 31st of August:-_

_Derek, seriously dude you pissed me off, you pissed us all off. Who the fuck leaves without saying goodbye, like you hadn't been with us for the last two years, like we weren't your friends or something, or are you too I don't even know, I can't think of the fucking word, but you pissed me off. Don't think that I'm the only one either because I'm with Scott right now—hey Scott come here!—he's not coming, you are an asshole. For leaving. Don't think that this is over because it's not; you're a st—_

Derek stares at the phone in his hand with a very, very deep-set frown on his face. The only reason he'd even listened to the thing had been the very cryptic text he had received from Stiles, _'Ignore that, seriously, fuck my life, sorry.' _It sounded like he had been in full-on rant mode, running his mouth until Derek's voicemail had literally cut him off. He'd have hated to hear what had come next but at the same moment he was undeniably curious. Stiles had always been the one to tell him what he actually thought without fear, something that the others hadn't been able to do. Or, he could chalk it down to Stiles was just an idiot.

"Was that Stiles' voice I heard?" Cora asks; she's towelling her hair as she speaks to him. He's still staring at the phone like he can't believe what he's just heard; he turns to look at her with his eyes narrowed.

"It was a voicemail." He says, and his hand that's holding his phone falls limply at his side. His sister narrows her eyes at him in suspicion in a mock of his own expression. It irks him, but he doesn't say anything.

"Want to talk about it?" She asks and he resolutely shakes his head, no, no he doesn't. Not at all, not in the slightest.

She shrugs at him and carries on drying her hair; she was the second one to get into the shower, so he's already finished. He can't remember what he was doing before his phone had pinged with the text, and then the voicemail. He'd charged it for the first time in a week; he hadn't been really bothered about keeping it on- there had been no one to call.

They'd left weeks ago now, they hadn't really decided where to go, this wasn't even a road trip, it was just leaving Beacon Hills. They were going from motel to motel and finding nothing. No one had been in contact before now. Actually, that may have been a lie, he has several voicemails that he suspects are from Peter, but he had only listened to the most recently received one. He didn't really want to speak to Peter anyway, his uncle was somewhat a loose canon when it came to family, usually if it suited him he would stay well away.

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_Don't worry about it, only just charged my phone._

He hesitates before adding-

_Hope everything's okay_.

That's enough right, to ease his somehow guilty conscience? It's absurd; he's got nothing to feel guilty about. No one cared that they left for a start, and not that he cared if they did.

"Can we at least do something fun tonight?" Cora asks him three days later in San José and he looks up from the TV, where he is watching re-runs of _Boardwalk Empire_ and has been doing ever since they checked in earlier.

"What would you call fun?" He asks her, propping his chin up on his fingers and raising his eyebrows at his sister.

"Not eating at Taco Bell for like, the millionth time in a row." He snorts, she's exaggerating but he knows she's right. They've not really been doing, well, anything at all. It soothes an itch however, the constant moving. An itch that he's not sure that she shares, but she's come along anyway because she's family. And she had called it 'bonding.' Jesus. Maybe, however, if he'd have tried harder with his family in the first place, Jennifer wouldn't have happened. Another thing to beat himself up about. He cuts that train of thought.

"We can go for Chinese?" He tries out tentatively and she scrunches up her face but then relaxes it.

"Fine, but we're eating at a restaurant, not having take out." It's an order not a request.

He gives into what she wants, purely because he's now the older sibling indulging the youngest, something he never thought he would be.

Stiles doesn't text back to his original text, but he does text unrelatedly a week later, when Cora is driving (he never knew she held a license, barley to be honest, she's dangerous) and they're somewhere near Sacramento. In a way, it's worse being on the road, because this is what he did with Laura after the fire- fled Beacon Hills. Only now it isn't Laura, he's traded one dead sister for another without any clue where she had been for the past years- something she doesn't really seem willing to part with.

It pings in his pocket and he pulls it out with a confused look, like he'd forgotten that it was there again. Cora looks at him but doesn't properly take her eyes off the road, she's singing along to a song on the radio that he doesn't know, and she is terribly off-key. He doesn't want to admit to himself that he likes it, so he doesn't. Sometimes Erica would do the same, and his heart aches again thinking of her, the pack members he once again couldn't save. She'd reminded him so much of Laura sometimes that he'd wanted to hate her, but he couldn't.

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Any advice on how to incapacitate a Siren? Yes before you ask they're real btw and yes before you ask we've pissed it off._

He sits there for about ten minutes trying to think of what their mother used to keep in the books about them. He does remember, however, that they're dangerous. They really shouldn't approach, unless they want to get into some serious trouble. Why is it always them, even when he's not there? Ah yes, now he remembers the procedure for killing one, one of Peter's personal favourites- he'd called it 'poetic'. That should have been the first sign of his severe mental breakdown.

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_Stab them with a dagger dipped in the blood of the person they're trying to hunt/lure cancels it out and poisons them._

"You've got your concentrating face on," she comments to Derek who tries his best to ignore her. "Why so concentrate-y, are you texting Stiles again?"

"That would imply we've text more than a grand total of twice since we left." He says curtly and she sighs at him, in the way that only a sibling can. He remembers Laura constantly being exasperated at him.

"It's cute," She says and he looks at her like she's a mentalist. "You two are cute." She says for clarification, like he'd missed what she'd been implying in the first place. He scrunches up his face at her with a weird look, women.

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Thanks man you're the best :D still not forgiven for skipping out though_

_Btw it's just my luck that its me. If I never text you again I've either cut my arm off or become a sex slave._

Great, now he can't stop thinking about the latter option.

"Do you remember them much?" He asks, on a night he's not feeling as raw as usual, as exposed to the world. Cora was younger; she wouldn't have been able to recall the finer details of their family. The room is dark and he's laid in the bed on the right, facing the wall so that she can't look at him. Going from motel to motel is not all that he thought that it would be, he doesn't feel the sense of freedom that he was expecting. If anything, he feels worse.

"I don't remember their faces sometimes." She says quietly in the end, maybe minutes later. "That makes it worse. Do you?"

He'd rather have that then the nightmares of imagining what he'd done to his own family, trapped burning inside what had been his only home. Back in the beginning he had used to wish that it had got him too, that he hadn't survived. He had gotten past that, with Laura. _Laura._

"Yeah." He breathes back, his heart heavy again with the knowledge that he'd been the one to cause it and everything that had happened since. Sometimes he felt the compulsion to talk about it, but it wasn't tonight. It wouldn't be tonight.

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_[1 attachment: IMG_ ]_

**From: Stiles**

**To: Derek**

I_s that monopoly in the park?! Omg I went there when my Mom was still alive!_

**From: Derek**

**To: Stiles**

_Yeah, Cora insisted we do something fun, this was her suggestion._

**From: Stiles**

**To: Derek**

_Hey, dude, monopoly in the park is totally fun. You must be doing it wrong._

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_How's Beacon Hills?_

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Same old, more mundane without it's resistant stalker._

A second later another text pops into the thread.

_FYI, the stalker is you._

Derek rolls his eyes at that one and his mouth twitches but neglects to reply, not because he doesn't want to, but because Cora is insistent that she's seen enough and that they should move on to the next place. Derek drives while she consults the map, picking out a random spot that isn't New York (he'd vetoed that one straight away) and getting lost over and over.

"When are you going to stop pretending that you don't want to go back?"

Cora asks this a week and a half later, and Derek looks away from her and back at the road. It's not like he's not been entertaining the idea, it's just that also there's the fact that no one has asked him to go back. What is there even to go back for? A pack that is no longer his, a complete psycho for an uncle? But what is there here for them either. There's nothing, there is always nothing. But there was nothing here either, this hadn't really helped in the way that he had expected it to. Not at all, he had bonded with his sister, had time to think everything through, but all it had done was make him want to _go back. _Back to where the worst memories of his life were- and yet, also the best.

"Where would we go?" He says instead and she looks at him like he's being obtuse. Stiles gives him the same look, he's memorized it. "We can't live like that anymore, I was stupid, I have to take care of you."

"We could flatten the house, get an apartment, you know, be normal."

He stares at her for longer than he should do, she notices and squirms under his gaze. He's still above her in the pack hierarchy even if they've technically attempted to make themselves omegas.

"We're werewolves, our entire family is dead. That is not normal."

She's silent from then on; the truth always does the trick in forcing people back to reality. It doesn't make him feel any less shitty though, pulling that one on her. Just sometimes he needs to remind her, and himself, that they can't be normal, can't have nice things, because he fucked up. It's getting better, it has to.

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_How's Scott and everyone?_

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Dear god you're alive, I was beginning to think that you'd been done away with, that would be such a shame. They're okay, honestly not much has changed. Come check us out again when you're done with your wolf wanderings or whatever_.

_Wolf wanderings_ is all that he gets from that conversation. Sometimes he wonders how Stiles is one of the brightest in his year, yet he grins anyway.

They're sitting in a diner on the way to Concord when Cora brings it up again, the whole situation. He really just doesn't want to talk about it, to label it, he wants to go back when he's ready. He's not sure if he's ever going to be ready, he's in a way still trying to outrun the same ghosts that he was after the fire, only now the body count was even higher.

"We could get a TV and everything Derek, just think about it." She says, trying to inject some enthusiasm into the conversation but he doesn't take the bait.

He makes a non-committal sound and goes back to eating his bacon, which is overcooked and making his jaw ache slightly from chewing.

"And," she says in a lilting voice. "You miss him. Well, you miss them all deep down, deep, deep, deep down. But Stiles is the one you miss the most. He misses you too."

He doesn't really say anything, because it's not like it's not the truth. He does miss them, in a way that he never thought he would. If he'd have told himself that, when he'd first stalked through the woods to give a newly turned Scott a warning he'd have thought he was insane. They'd become pack; they'd become his family. Family that he hadn't really wanted, but had somehow come across.

"You can't spend your entire life running away from the fire Derek, you have to move on at some point. Running away won't set you free." But she doesn't _know,_ she hasn't talked it out with him. He can't.

"You can't say that, not when-" He starts off but she cuts through him.

"If you want to talk about it, we will." Is all she replies calmly and pops the piece of chicken into her mouth. He looks away from her gaze that tells him she knows too much, but not enough. He can't keep going on like this though, that much is true, if he can trust anyone, he can trust family.

"Not yet," he says "But soon, I want to try."

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_I think Peter wants to kill me, or molest me, I can never tell which one with you people._

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_Maybe it's a mixture of both? Personally I don't think erotic homicide is my thing, but good luck to him. Maybe he can finally shut you up, or gag you._

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Ha fucking ha._

"Get the fuck off me, shit, Cora for fuck's sake!" He pushes her away as she tries to climb his body again like a tree, straining for the food that he's holding in his hand.

"That's mine and you know it, I ordered the one with the pecans!" She did not order the one with the pecans, she's just baiting him and it's working.

"I swear to God it's mine, get off me." She's the only one that talks back to him, that would do that, except Stiles. It's weird how he can associate his actual, real, dead family to his new pack (that he's left, he's totally left, he may never go back) but in a way it's not at all, it's just the way it is. Like he's been given a second chance at a family but he fucked that one up too.

She doesn't stop and eventually he gives in anyway, but she has a strange look on her face when he does, like it wasn't the food that she really wanted him to give her. But it reminds him of home, the constant bickering over food that had happened in the Hale household, but also in his pack. _Erica, Boyd_,_ Isaac_ he misses them too and so he just humours her like he should have done them.

He does talk about it, a week later but not with her.

"I know." Stiles had said when he'd finished to Derek's tirade. It occurred to Derek that this was the first time he's heard Stiles' voice since he'd left. It surprises him that he misses it, it also surprises him that Stiles picked up at all. He'd simply felt the compulsion to tell Stiles, who really, in all honesty he'd thought of as sort of his pack second before the beta thing. If he had a problem, Stiles was usually his go-to for advice, which, seen as he was a human was unusual. He was glad, that he had refused the bite from Peter- he couldn't imagine the amount of trouble that Stiles would get into as a werewolf. Actually, he could and it made him want to grit his teeth but made his wolf hum all at once.

"I know about Paige and I already sort of knew about Kate?" He trails off with his voice going higher at the end in a classic defensive tone.

Derek stiffened, how the hell could he know about that, who would have even told him?

"How?" He's trying not to be angry, but when was Stiles going to mention that he knew a lot more about Derek than the guy thought that he did.

"Peter and Cora told me, um, when you went away for that few days. I went looking for you. I was only going to bring it up if I had to."

Well, that's also news to him. No one had bothered to tell him that Stiles had been looking for him, that he'd been thought about. He'd just kind of assumed that his lack of existence had been noted, but that they'd moved on.

"Is that why you won't come back?" Stiles asks, and he's silent, he taps his phone against the side of his head.

"It's just, I don't deserve it, I fucked it all up." He says and he can hear Stiles breathing on the end of the phone but not saying a word. "I don't deserve to be able to just, I mean, Erica, Boyd, Jennifer, I make one bad decision after another and I don't want that, I just want to be, _normal_." He grits out at the end, frustrated with himself.

"You can't blame yourself for falling in love with someone." Stiles says like he's talking from experience, he probably is- Lydia, he thinks to himself.

"I don't know." He says honestly. "I do, I blame myself."

"Come back when you're ready." Stiles says, and that's even if Derek is ever ready to come back. He doesn't say that though, he just says yes. "I miss you, and I didn't think that was even possible." Stiles laughs on the end of the phone and something inside him clenches painfully.

**To: Derek**

**From: Scott**

_Man, Isaac is asking me sum really awkward qs right now and I wish I knew the answers. Hope ur okay_.

**To: Scott**

**From: Derek**

_Well that's what you get for being the Alpha now. I'm alright, I'm better._

"I really missed you," Cora says to him in the diner near Alameda, and it pangs in his stomach, but he's ready. "All of us, I missed you all. I never thought that I'd see any of you again."

He wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her tight to him in a way that would crush a human. She smells like home, still somehow after all these years. Or maybe it's just that home had a new smell that he didn't realise until now.

"It was my fault." He says and it's like getting a weight off his chest, like letting go of a rock that was causing him to drown.

"Kate Argent was never your fault." She replies and hugs him with an arm across his waist and it hurts, it bubbles up inside him and his eyes sting but he doesn't say anything. But when it all recedes again, he thinks maybe it doesn't hurt quite so much.

"No, she wasn't," He says, "But it doesn't stop me feeling like she was. But I swear Cora, I didn't know, I didn't fucking know." He bites his lip and she presses harder against him in an attempt at comfort and it helps.

"Derek, no one blames you. You've got to stop blaming yourself." And it doesn't make it easier but it's not as hard to breathe.

**To: Derek**

**From: Stiles**

_Peter made us a casserole and I don't think he poisoned it- what does that mean?_

_**To: Stiles**_

_**From: Derek**_

_Go to sleep Stiles, it's 3am._

_**To: Derek**_

_**From: Stiles**_

_I know but it's keeping me awake thinking about it, I mean, Peter made us food. I thought that was a pack thing? Not that I'm not happy to get free food, I mean count me in, but your uncle is a bag of cats dude and he did bite Scott and come back from the dead so forgive me for being a bit weary. You'd normally be telling to shut up right about now, I can tell you're doing that thing with your face where your eyebrows become one long line right now. Yeah. Look in the mirror big guy. That's right._

_**To: Stiles**_

_**From: Derek**_

_Be quiet and go to sleep._

He glances upwards away from his phone before adding-

_I don't have a monobrow._

It's not easy. He sells the apartment in New York; he doesn't go there, that would be too much, and he orders what's left there to be put into storage.

Cora gloats; she apparently knew he wouldn't last much longer. But he does feel different, lighter. Like he's no longer made of a heavy substance, like he's got the roaming he desperately needed to do off his chest. Hide and heal had always been the advice for werewolves when they were suffering from something. He'd done just that. The trip hadn't been what he thought that it would be, but it had seemed to have helped all the same.

They buy a normal apartment in the uptown of Beacon Hills. It has a TV. It's big enough for six but it's just Cora and himself. Maybe that will change, maybe it won't. He's not sure. Cora had spent ages finding it online in the Internet café before consulting him on it. He hadn't been too bothered; he'd just wanted a home again. Wanted a pack again, and he knew that he'd never really left the one he had. She sets it all up, she even picks color schemes, and it's not until a 'do you think Lydia would prefer cream or just gloss?' that he realises what she's doing.

He doesn't even try to stop her.

He gets the feeling though that he'd never have been happy if he'd have stayed away. His entire family had been from Beacon Hills, and in a creepy sort of poetic way that Peter would totally have appreciated, they belong there.

They stay in the motel for three more nights. They talk, they eat, and they discuss the apartment. Cora talks about school, Derek shares his own experiences with Laura after the fire. Cora tells him about how she lived. It's mundane but at the same time it's everything. He didn't always used to be so tightly wound. Maybe he can change himself for the better.

It's a Monday when they decide to go back, and Cora says "It's been long enough, we know where we belong." and Derek finally agrees.

Cora puts her feet on the dashboard on the way home (yes, home) and he knocks them off at least three times before giving up. She turns the music up too loud and knocks his sunglasses off his face to piss him off twice and he just grins.

They head back to Beacon Hills; it's been three months.

**To: Derek, Cora**

**From: Stiles**

_We want you guys home, we all want you home, especially you Derek, you douchebag._

("I told you," Cora says, "cute.")

He spends three days settling in before he works up the courage to leave the apartment for the first time and see the loft. He knows that he's going to have to either flatten it or renovate it but at the same time he feels tied to it, something that's his fault, a reminder. Maybe that's exactly why he should take up Cora's suggestion, a fresh start, the beta he was always meant to be and being less of a fuck up.

**To: Stiles**

**From: Derek**

_The loft._

Of course he's there, there was going to be no doubt about that.

"You're back then?"

Stiles has beaten him to it, saying something as he walks through the door. He had parked his Camaro out the front and didn't see any sign of the Jeep then. He hadn't even heard it rumble up, been too lost in thought of what to do with the house.

"Yeah." He says slowly, not turning around, not wanting to see his face when Stiles is clearly still so disappointed. He's not the Alpha now, he can't shoulder the blame like he did, he just wants to let go. He's their equal.

"It was a pretty shitty thing to do you know, leaving us like that." Even though it's been three months and they've talked since then, he's apparently still not over it, but Derek isn't either.

He shrugs. "I wasn't anyone's Alpha anymore, I didn't have to be here, you didn't need me here."

"That didn't mean we didn't care, asshole." It's light in tone but loaded anyway and it hits like a punch. He continues staring at the alpha pack sign, somehow still here after all that time. Yeah, he thinks, flatten or renovate.

"Scott had to tell me you left. _Scott _for fucks sake." Derek really doesn't know what to say so he just says the truth.

"I had to go, I had to have time." Is all he says, and Stiles looks at the sign, he can see it happen in his peripheral vision. He seems to get it. Stiles hasn't changed, of course he hasn't but then again he hadn't needed to. There always had been something too intelligent in Stiles, he had seen through everyone but no one had seen through him. His hair is currently stuck up all over the place, and he wonders why he hasn't had it cut like he used to. Maybe he's just grown up.

"I have an apartment now, it has a TV and everything." Is not exactly what he wanted to say but it's what comes out. Stiles raises an eyebrow in curiosity like he's interested in Derek's word vomit.

"Is that your way of apologising?" Stiles says almost with a smile. "TV at your apartment?"

Derek looks at him with a calculating look, turning around properly now. "If you want it to be."

"What if I don't want it to be?"

"What if I don't want you to want it to be?" He says, stepping closer, just in time to see the glower of annoyance at the words cross Stiles' face.

Stiles huffs in irritation and closes the gap between them forcefully, hands twisting into the front of his shirt and pressing his dry, warm lips against Derek's until he yields, letting the younger man's tongue into his mouth. Derek's hands move, finally, because he really hadn't expected it. Stiles is warm, not as warm as he is, but his skin is flushed to the touch and he can hear and feel the boys heartbeat racket inside his ribcage.

Stiles had missed Derek, he'd listened to what he'd had to say and not judged, Stiles was family _and_ pack twisted in a way until it became unnoticeable, worming his way into Derek's life with his best friend. Somewhere there's a him that this hasn't happened to, where Scott still has bad asthma, Stiles could be first line on the lacrosse team and Derek's Dad's jacket smells like pack and home and not smoke. But that isn't now and he can't change it.

He gets a leg between Stiles' and presses him firmly against the wall, his hands running down Stiles' sides and pulling something between a laugh and a groan from within him. Derek's mouth twitches into an almost smile against Stiles' as he pulls away to look at the younger man whose eyes are backlit with something other than lust (which is what anyone had ever felt for Derek, there had never been another motive)

"You're still an asshole." Stiles says.

"Seconded." Says a voice from the doorway.

Cora's staring at them with a disgusted expression but Derek can't even find it in himself to care, just puts a hand on Stiles' shoulder and drags him closer. She makes a gesture that makes Stiles produce an indignant noise and he smiles with his teeth at the both of them.

They get cable, Cora and Stiles argue over it.

Lydia does like cream more than gloss, and Isaac likes real cream more than the color.

Scott eats all the food in the apartment (that Peter for some unfathomable reason cooks) but Derek let's him (the guy is the Alpha after all)

They're home.


End file.
